The mastercrafted armor has noticably less potency than even the quested gear (not even comparing to overland solo or instance solo gear).
Example:
Infernal Leather Shoes are a reward from a solo quest. They have 747.1 potency
Academic's leather Boots of Endurance, with the same stat mix. They have 672.3 potency

Sure that's not a huge differenc, until you consider that is the 'worst' gear attainable in the expac compared to the 'best' gear that can be crafted. I would hope that the best crafted gear would have potency at least as good as the worst gear attainable any other way.

“Just crafted all 6 belts with the purified rares and got no bonus status over the regular rares. Will update later after crafting everything else on whether everything else is the same way.”

I just did the leather "evasion" set, and saw the same thing. No "refined" label on the recipe pages, no "refined" tag on the finished products, no refined stats. They all ate the refined rares quite happily though.

[Feedback] In the upper tiers, tailors have had cloaks that use hides, and belts that use roots. Currently, the Chaos Descending cloaks AND belts are using pelts. It would be a "good thing" to swap the belt recipes back over to using roots. With both the root nodes and the nurseries both returning rare roots, we have a LOT of rare roots floating around. (It'd also make things a bit more consistent. )

stats:
DPS doesn't change on the Academic's Pants of Rage/Leather Greaves of Rage compared to the Student's Pants of Rage/Leather Greaves of Rage (it's in all 4 cases 280.4 DPS). It's the only stat that doesn't change between handcrafted and mastercrafted

I'll do purified tomorrow, once more it's 1am ^^

Overall, I have to say that there's a great consistency: books are well named, items are well named and so on. It's nice.